In a remote corner of the world, forgotten for nearly three thousand years, lived an enclave of Kurdish Jews so isolated that they still spoke Aramaic, the language of Jesus. Mostly illiterate, they were self-made mystics and gifted storytellers and humble peddlers who dwelt in harmony with their Muslim and Christian neighbors in the mountains of northern Iraq. To these descendants of the Lost Tribes of Israel, Yona Sabar was born.
Yona's son Ariel grew up in Los Angeles, where Yona had become an esteemed professor, dedicating his career to preserving his people s traditions. Ariel wanted nothing to do with his father s strange immigrant heritage until he had a son of his own.
Ariel Sabar brings to life the ancient town of Zakho, discovering his family s place in the sweeping saga of Middle-Eastern history. This powerful book is an improbable story of tolerance and hope set in what today is the very center of the world s attention.

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An award-winning author reveals the real-life Da Vinci Code fraud that rocked the establishment. An ancient manuscript is discovered claiming that Jesus was married to Mary Magdalene. The religious world is thrown into turmoil. It sounds like the plot of a conspiracy thriller, and is one of the biggest scandals of modern scholarship. In 2012, Dr Karen King, a star professor at Harvard Divinity School, announced a blockbuster discovery at a scholarly conference just steps from the Vatican: she had found an ancient fragment of papyrus in which Jesus called Mary Magdalene 'my wife'. The tattered manuscript made international headlines. Biblical scholars were in an uproar, but King had impeccable credentials as a world-renowned authority on female figures in the lost Christian texts from Egypt known as the Gnostic gospels. As Ariel Sabar began to investigate the mysteries surrounding the papyrus, he embarked on an indefatigable globe-spanning hunt that ultimately uncovered the forgery and the identity of the forger, reckoning with fundamental questions about the nature of truth and the line between faith and reason.

Intrigued by the romance of his own parents, who met in Washington Square Park, Ariel Sabar set off on a far-reaching search for other couples who married after first meeting in one of New York City's iconic public spaces. Sabar conjures their big-city love stories in novel like detail, drawing us into the hearts of strangers just as their lives are about to change forever.